Acrylic on canvas, fabric, wood
14.5’ x 7.5’
2025

Los Nadies [The Nobodies] is a procession of images, bodies, and memories that moves between celebration and resistance. The project takes its title from Eduardo Galeano’s poem Los Nadies (The Nobodies) from El libro de los abrazos (1989)—a text that gives voice to those erased from history, the ones whose labor, hope, and struggle sustain the world yet remain unseen.

Commissioned by The Ringling Museum of Art for Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway), and curated by Amy Rosenblum-Martin, Los Nadies draws from two visual traditions that reveal how communities mark their journeys through both faith and survival: the alfombras de aserrín (sawdust carpets) of Nicaragua, and the painted circus banners. The first, ephemeral and devotional, are made for processions during Semana Santa; the second, loud and mobile, are born from spectacle and constant movement. Together, they echo cycles of creation and disappearance, the rituals of making and unmaking that define our histories.

The installation consists of eight monumental fabric banners, each 14.5 × 7.5 feet, forming a continuous sequence along the wall, a civic vía crucis del pueblo, a people’s journey. The compositions mirror the gestures of bodies in procession: walking, lifting, carrying, celebrating, protesting. These are images of both the sacred and the secular—protesters, migrants, dancers, workers—united by the shared choreography of endurance.

Materially, the work stays close to the body and to labor. Each banner is made from unprimed canvas, dyed with watered-down matte acrylics that act as pigment rather than paint, preserving the raw textile surface. Over this, layers of upholstery fabric, and photographic transfers come together through heat and pressure. Even the images—hands, masks, fragments of faces, are printed on transfer fabric, keeping every element within the language of cloth.

This focus on fabric is not only aesthetic but symbolic. It connects the work to men ad women’s labor, to the domestic and the theatrical, to the material history of banners, curtains, and tents. It is also personal. As a child in Ecuador, I was captivated by circuses. I went to every one that came through town, from the grand Hermanos Fuentes Gasca to the humble Circo Mequeque. I remember standing after school, watching the tent rise from the earth, the wagons becoming homes, the animals arriving, a world built and dismantled overnight. That nomadic energy, that spirit of reinvention, still drives me. Presenting this work at The Ringling, a museum born from the circus, feels like a return to that origin.

Los Nadies stands in dialogue with the museum’s monumental European painting galleries, with their gilded frames and heroic narratives. These banners respond to that grandeur with another kind of monumentality, one made of fabric and collective memory rather than oil and empire. It is a gesture of reclaiming scale, of turning history’s margins into its main stage.

Ultimately, this work is about repetition and resilience, how history replays itself across borders, how the same gestures of resistance, faith, and celebration reappear under different skies. It is a looped journey, a visual chorus of the people who, though unnamed, continue to move, to speak, and to be seen.